


Look Him in the Eye

by Prix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Coping, F/M, Friends to Enemies, Missing Scene, Season 2, Shippy Gen, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-30 21:18:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21146774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prix/pseuds/Prix
Summary: Skye tries to psych herself up for the day when she has to go face the psycho living in the basement.[Canon-compliant to the beginning of S2. The word psycho used because Skye used it. Could be shippy angst or gen.]





	Look Him in the Eye

**Author's Note:**

> I'm basically in this perpetual loop where I watch a bit further in S2 of Agents of SHIELD but never get a lot farther. I will get further one day, though, because I want to see Season 4. 
> 
> I like SkyeWard so this is technically with a mind to being SkyeWard friendly, but it is pretty no-fluff and not very kind about anyone's state of mind. Canon compliant, so whatever ship you do or don't sail it should be fine within that context. 
> 
> Written for [trope-bingo on dreamwidth](https://trope-bingo.dreamwidth.org/) for my [**Friends to Enemies**](https://prixmium.dreamwidth.org/15190.html) square.

Skye throws herself into work. At the Playground, it is the only thing she can do. 

Every effort to find a moment to step back, exhale, and feel herself sink down into her old skin is pointless. Another second’s reprieve is another moment where she has to feel her heartbeat ratchet back up until it feels like she can’t breathe. 

So, she buys herself a FitBit. She fiddles with it until the data goes into their servers rather than feeding it directly into Big Data. She wonders if SHIELD _is_ Big Data for a bit, but she doubts it now. Besides, there is always insurance in redundancy. 

It isn’t really when she has somewhere to run to, something to _do_ that she feels just how not-cut-out-for-this she is. The adrenaline takes care of her. It always has. It’s when she wakes up in the middle of the night; it’s when she sees Fitz come to and be nothing like himself; it’s when she walks by the dark doors that lead into a dark basement that she can only imagine is a dungeon. She tastes something bitter in her mouth. It’s when the adrenaline comes when it shouldn’t. 

That’s what she has to take care of. 

And so one morning, she is up and waiting at 4:58, sitting cross-legged on the floor in yoga pants and a tank-top with a ponytail. 

“Good morning,” May says pleasantly when she turns the lights the rest of the way up. It’s a lot more pleasant than May has usually sounded to her. Maybe she is just the definition of a Morning Person. 

“Hi,” Skye says, trying to gain command of her voice from the thin mucous that tells her she is definitely not a Morning Person. That doesn’t matter anymore, though. 

“Can’t sleep?” May asks. 

“No, I set my alarm,” Skye replies, not exactly sullen at the lack of appreciation. She has been getting used to it. No one is really in the mood for appreciation after their career has turned them into wanted terrorists and sent them underground. She examines her fingernails - short and unpolished but still shiny. “You said, back at that hotel. You were up at 5:00.” 

“Well, what are you waiting for?” May prompts. 

Skye looks up and smiles, glad that at least something is a path of not-much resistance. She gets to her feet and promptly gets her ass kicked by every single thing May asks her to do. 

It’s a start, though.

* * *

It’s been months, and Skye has now learned to keep an eye on her FitBit every time she is under any kind of stress and sometimes when she, at least by some standard, isn’t. She is stronger than she was before. Harder, too. She doesn’t flinch away from things like she used to. 

She says “Yes, sir,” “No, ma’am,” and “Copy that,” as if she were born to be this. Whatever this is. It certainly isn’t just Communications. 

She isn’t sure she’s happy, but she’s making it through. They all are. 

Except those who just couldn’t cut it and left. 

She thinks that she has reached a point where she can handle almost anything, except when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye, going toward that one particular door - painted black. 

Or maybe the metal itself is black. She doesn’t want to look closely enough to find out, even though she has learned to look closely at everything. 

The fact that they still go down there means that he’s still down there. It means that when she goes to sleep at night, he is technically under the same roof. It means he isn’t _dead_. 

And when she goes to sleep at night, sometimes she closes her eyes and drifts off, and she almost feels the weightlessness and occasional jolt of turbulence that was living on a plane. She feels a smaller but cozier bunk around her, the first bed she’s called ‘hers’ in a long time. She imagines that he might duck his head down and call out to her at any moment, telling her something’s up or that it’s time to go train. 

She feels her body relax into the mattress, floating in placelessness and back in time. 

She can feel herself searching for something soft to throw at him. She can remember complaining, calling him ‘mean,’ and telling him to ‘leave her alone.’ 

She had never imagined. She would have never imagined until the bloody, terrible truth had dripped down over her head. 

Those dreams never last long, and they always end by drawing her back up through hundreds of feet of icy-cold water. Only metaphorically. She blinks her eyes open and draws two lungfuls of air as if she expects a strong, immovable arm to squeeze against her throat. She managed to swallow. Her heartbeat slows down only bit by bit by bit. And she knows what her FitBit will say. A little set of lines and valleys and peaks and a sudden spike at 2:00 A.M., telling her what she already knows. 

Her body has gotten stronger, and when she is in the field she has learned to push her emotions out of the way. But when she tries to go to sleep, she can’t completely banish the person she used to be. 

And there comes the most dangerous thought of all. 

A small part of her, through all the fury and the bitter taste in her mouth, wonders if he is down there in the basement, thinking about who he used to be. 

Was he ever really anything she thought she knew at all? 

It’s easier if he wasn’t. It’s easier if she doesn’t give a damn. 

She lifts her wrist and attunes her eyes to the darkness around her bunk. She squints and makes out the number, declining steadily back toward the 60s - faster each time. One day, she hopes that it won’t rocket out of them at all. 

She closes her eyes and tries to find some of the peace and center that May seems to find in meditation. Or whatever it is. She doesn’t have a mind still enough for it and doesn’t know if she ever will. She wishes that she could master the _hate-fu_ as she’d called it once. 

Harnessing the hate to do what she has to do isn’t the problem, though. 

It’s the part of her that hasn’t learned to hate. 

She glares into the darkness, summoning every bitter word and letting it roll under her tongue without making a sound. 

She _wants_ to yell at him. She wants to lay into him, small fists pummeling that wall of a chest until he tumbles down into rubble beneath her. 

But then she remembers watching him lying there, dying on the floor. 

Would she demand that it stop? Now, would she? 

She probably could manage to keep her tongue still, to walk away, and to call it another loss that she had to leave behind in the field. Probably. 

She wonders what that says about what she _has become_, but she tries again not to think about it. 

She knows that the day will come when someone tells her that she has to go down there. 

_”Help us, Skye. You’re our only hope.”_

Only she knows what happens to the damn spirit guide in the end of those kinds of stories, and she isn’t about it let him win. Not over her. Not ever. 

And so she imagines his eyes. She imagines what they looked like, open and like some kind of trusting mutt in a purebred body. And then she sees them hard, determined that he held no higher loyalty than to a lunatic who turned out to be a sad excuse even for a modern-day Nazi. 

She bites a thumbnail and forces her hand back down. 

She’ll have to look him in the eye one day. She won’t be able to flinch. And she doesn’t know what she’ll accomplish for them, or what he’ll try to do. She just knows that she has to keep looking, no matter what she sees in him. No matter what it makes her see in herself.


End file.
